Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter & Browned Butter Cookies

Tonight I get to share some cookies with some special ladies...the members of the Tween Bookclub that I host at my library!  We ran the program for our winter programming session, with one meeting per month to get together and chat about our book selections, and create some fun art (we were making bookmarks in the picture!).  Tonight is the last of those meetings, a perfect opportunity to bring a treat for the girls and say farewell until the fall.

These girls were voracious readers, and hard for me to keep up with because of my hectic schedule.  I tend to mostly read tween/teen books already, as it's my key audience for readers' advisory at my library location, so I really enjoyed the books they had selelcted:

Keeper - by Kathi Appelt
Blood Red Road - by Moira Young
Rebel Heart (sequel to Blood Red Road) by Moira Young
If I Stay (Book 1) By Gayle Forman
Where She Went (Book 2) by Gayle Forman
...Check 'em out!

Do you ever brown your butter for cookie recipes?  Browning the butter takes just an additional moment, but envelopes the butter with the most delicious, deep and nutty flavour.   Cook the butter past the melting point, stiring occastionaly keeping a close eye on it, as it can go from brown to burnt very easily.  It will kind of froth up, and then you will see the brown, and smell the nutty aroma!  Done!  You could even brown the butter ahead of time, and keep it in the fridge...then it would be just like creaming butter in a regular cookie recipe. 

This particular recipe hides the additional flavour with the peanut butter, but the butter needed to be melted anyways...so what the heck!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter & Browned Butter Cookies 

Recipe adapted from: Averie Cooks 

1/2 cup browned butter
1/3 cup peanut butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup flax meal
1 cup old fashioned whole oats
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup peanut butter chips (white chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, walnuts, pecans, etc would all be yum too!)


Preheat oven to 350F
In a medium sized deep pan, brown your butter, remove from heat and add peanut butter, and stir until melted and incorporated with the browned butter.  Add the sugars to the butter(s) mixture, stir, and then set aside (outside if it's cold, or fridge, or freezer!) to cool while assembling additional ingredients. 
In a medium bowl add together flour, flax, oats, and baking soda.
Ensure that your melted butter mixture is now at room temperature (you don't want to cook your eggs!) then add the egg, vanilla, and stir.  Now add flour mixture to butter mixture and give it a good stir until flour is well combined.  Finally, add the chocolate and peanut butter chips to the dough and mix into the dough.
Scoop with a spoon or roll into balls onto cookie sheet, about 2 inches apart.
Bake for 10-12 minutes.  The cookies will be underdone, but that's fine!  They will stay soft and chewy longer with less cooking time. Remove from oven, and place on wire rack to cool. 

Enjoy!